There is conventionally proposed a binocular parallax detecting method that determines, as the variation in pixel positions on left and right images, a binocular parallax variation amount that corresponds to a subject and a background or to plural subjects having different distances from a camera (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2-100589). In the method disclosed in this publication, when determining the binocular parallax, left and right images are two-dimensionally Fourier transformed, and several candidates for a parallax displacement amount are computed by shift matching the phase terms thereof. Thereafter, contour extraction and region determination of the subject are carried out for each of the left and right images, and correspondence is achieved with the displacement amount candidates determined by using two-dimensional Fourier transformation at a point at the inner side and plural points at the outer side of these boundary points, and a binocular parallax amount of a stereo image, that includes both a background and subjects having different parallax amounts, is determined.
Further, there is proposed a multi-viewpoint image display method that makes an overall image easy to view uniformly by changing the positional relationships between the convergence angle and the furthest distance, nearest distance, and shifting images so as to, for example, cancel-out the average value of the parallax between the images (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-32840).